Huawei says it has made huge strides

China’s Huawei Technologies said it had made operating systems and artificial intelligence breakthroughs. It had taken the company 10 years to do what the US and Europe took 30 years to achieve.

Richard Yu, chairman of Huawei’s Consumer Business Group, spoke at the opening of a three-day developer conference in the southern Chinese city of Dongguan, where he said the company’s Harmony operating system was now available on more than 900 million devices.

“Harmony has made breakthroughs. You can say that in 10 years, we’ve achieved what it took our European and American counterparts more than 30 years to build the core technology of an independent operating system,” Yu said.

HarmonyOS is Huawei’s proprietary operating system, which was launched in 2019 when US technology restrictions cut it off from Google support for the Android operating system it used in smartphones.

Yu added that the company’s Ascend artificial intelligence infrastructure — the most powerful from a Chinese company — was now the second most popular after Nvidia, which dominates the market for AI chips.

Operating systems and other software have been dominated by Europe and the US for a long time. However, the era of the Internet of Things has allowed Huawei to overtake them, he said.

Huawei’s smartphone business has reentered since the Mate 60 launched last year with an improved China-made chip. Yu said that harmony-equipped smartphone sales have risen 68% in the first five months of the year.

In the first quarter of 2024, Huawei’s HarmonyOS surpassed Apple’s iOS to become the second best-selling mobile operating system in China behind Android with a 17% market share, research firm Counterpoint said.